Finding the turning point in a season is always something done in retrospect.
On May 30, the Mets woke up after being swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers to cap a 4-15 run that saw them fall to 11 games below .500, 6.0 games out of the final National League Wild Card and just 3.0 games ahead of a rock-bottom Miami side.
The players called a team meeting immediately after the game to clear the air and re-group after a brutal stretch, which included a surreal moment involving reliever Jorge Lopez throwing his glove into the stands.
The Mets have gone 11-4 since, capping it off a 5-1 homestand with an 11-6 win on Sunday and a three-game sweep of the San Diego Padres.
“Good homestand, very good series against a very good team,” manager Carlos Mendoza said.
Amid the turnaround, Mendoza hasn’t sensed any change in attitude around the clubhouse.
“We’re winning games, but even when it was hard for us, the guys never gave up, they continued to show up every day, they continued to work,” the manager said. “Our preparation continues to get better. And they’re having fun. A lot of time people forget that this game’s hard and you’re gonna go through struggles. And you gotta find a way to stay positive, even when it’s hard, even when it gets loud. And that’s what they’ve done.
“No panic, continue to show up, get better, continue to work. Things will get there. Because we got a lot of special players there. To see it now come through and a lot of guys contribute is exciting.”
Mendoza said that during the rough patch, his job as manager was to “continue to stay positive” with the players and keep the “big picture in mind.”
“There [are] gonna be ups and downs you just gotta be consistent. Lotta veteran guys there, they’ve been through it before, and I had no doubt that we were gonna get through it,” he said. “We still got ways to go. But the mindset is one game at a time, one series at a time.”
When asked how good it is to find themselves back in the postseason race, shortstop Francisco Lindor said, “I thought we were always in the postseason race.”
“Some people had us out, but in my mind, I felt like we got the team, we got the personnel,” he continued. “I still haven’t looked at the standings. I still haven’t looked at our record. But we just gotta keep on climbing the mountain.”
Mendoza said they’ve been in a postseason race “since day one” when they said they wanted to compete, but won’t get “caught up in the standings, we just gotta take care of business, day in and day out.”
When asked if he finds himself peaking at the standings, first baseman Pete Alonso said with a laugh, “Not much ‘cause you guys typically tell us where we’re at.”
For the record, the Mets (33-37) are now just 1.5 games behind the Padres (37-38) for the final Wild Card spot, but with five teams still between them and San Diego.
“This is a good wave that we’re riding right now, we just gotta make sure we stay on it for as long as we can,” Lindor said. “And then once that wave is done, we gotta find the other good wave.”
Riding that wave looked pretty easy for most of Sunday afternoon, but that wasn’t the case when a late rally from San Diego cut the lead to one. “Even though we had the game all the way, it got hairy there in the eighth,” the skipper said.
After Drew Smith got the final two outs to put out the fire, the Mets responded with a four-run bottom half of the inning starting with Luis Torrens’ leadoff home run.
“Huge, huge, and you could feel it in the dugout,” Mendoza said of the backup catcher’s solo shot. “As soon as he hit that ball, the reaction from the boys. Now you’re up two, kinda shut down any momentum that they had going into the ninth… and then continued to put together some really good at-bats.”
It was a good team win, the manager said, and emblematic of the turnaround of the last few weeks. “Some of those games we were losing in May,” he said, “and today we found a way.”
Even in a sport like baseball – with month-long spring training, a six-month regular season followed by a six-week postseason – there still always seems to be a great deal of emphasis placed on singular instances or individual games and small sample sizes for big conclusions to be drawn.
“I think that over the course of the 162-game season, certain things early can get highlighted, especially either success or struggles,” Alonso said. “But I think that now that as we’re progressing we’re starting to come into our self, understand our identity, and hit our stride a little bit.
“I’m really excited that we had a great homestand.”
What’s next? “Now we gotta go on the road and play another good team,” Mendoza said as the Mets head out for a six-game road trip with three against the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers.
“This homestand we played really clean baseball,” Alonso said. “I thought we did a great job defensively, pitching and putting together great at-bats together in the lineup.
“And if we can play good team baseball, we can string some wins together. That’s what we did this homestand, and hopefully, we continue it on the road.”
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